Humanoid

It makes sense in that it sort of parallels the role of speakers in any audio system. The work of all the electronics earlier in the chain can only ever be as good as the output device at the end of it allows. Most of the rest of your system simply exists to allow for the monitor to display the best image it possibly can. However there is a caveat in that monitor technology is magnitudes more volatile than speaker technology. Great speakers are things that will serve you for decades, and indeed likely serve your children. Great displays, not so much. Whether or not you think OLED or some alternative technology is the future, current backlit LCD technology and its attendant issues like uniformity is getting really long in the tooth. I would not personally be prepared to spend a whole lot on any LCD product with that in mind, despite having done so in the past.

I'm playing Might and Magic 6 right now. The intro involves your party of adventurers in a fort being attacked by devils. A dragon arrives and to escape it you jump into the nearest well. Miraculously surviving the fall and asphyxiation, you begin to climb back out of the well. However, midway up, you find some sort of Mr Miyagi who lives in a tunnel carved into the side of the well I guess? He shares some exposition and begins the process of training you up into mighty adventurers. *cue training montage* TL;DR: Wise hermit lives in a well you just happen to jump into.

A bit more shopping, halfway between an impulse-purchase and not. See, I was informed of a great deal on a 750W BitFenix Whisper M PSU. Never heard of it before but some research shows it's well-regarded, and the price being asked was two-thirds of equivalent PSUs from the likes of Corsair and Seasonic. But shipping would have made it still-a-good-deal, but I wanted a great deal. The store has a promo where buying $99 worth of Thermaltake stuff made the entire order ship for free. Now I generally despise Thermaltake for how gaudy and plasticky they tend to be, especially in their past, but I was conveniently pointed to what looked like a decent and miraculously understated memory pair, a H-ONE 3600MHz CL18 set. Nothing special spec-wise but for $99 it's very cheap, exactly the amount I needed to spend for the promo, and I've been having problems with my current PC which I had to get around by disabling the XMP profile, so I figure why not. Next, I figured that since I was getting free shipping anyway, I may as well buy the case for my actual build, even if it's likely not happening until next year. So I bought the Fractal Design Define 7 in white, no window, the case I had wanted all along. And finally, I thought that since my current 6700K system isn't all that bad currently, and I need to clean out my current case (a Define R5) to find that damned fan clip, I devised a case shuffle, or musical chairs. I would build my new PC, then move my current system into a cheap-ish case, then in the future use the freed-up case to perhaps build a new system for my sister, whose PC is of a similar vintage to mine (an i5-6500 and RX570 I think). So in the end the damage is: - BitFenix Whisper M 750W _ 2x8GB Thermaltake H-ONE 3600MHz kit - Fractal Design Define 7 White, no window - be quiet! Pure Base 500 White, no window For a total of about $600AUD, happy with that.

Somehow I failed to notice the existence of the Might and Magic 6-7-8 merge project until now, it's been a thing for three years already, and still is receiving updates. Like the World of Xeen thing that merged the fourth and fifth game together, this project merges the three games under the MM8 engine. I've only done a test run so far because I haven't figured out how I want to run my "real" game. There are some natural limitations that come about as a result of the subtly different mechanics between the games. For example, the logical thing would be to want to run the games in release order sequence. But I also want to run a Thief character, and as that class only existed in MM7 and not the other two, it means I'd be forced to take an early detour to another continent when it came time for the class promotion quest. Progression would be smoother if I instead stuck to classes that existed in the first (uhh, sixth) game, but I suppose if I stuck to that game's structure completely, what would be the point of running the merger in the first place? P.S. It also comes with some other modern trimmings like widescreen support, quicksaves, mouselook, etc, though I'm not sure I want mouselook on right now, hmm.

Seems like a well-handled launch from every link in the chain. AMD's official pricing is essentially exactly the same as it is in the US (XE currency conversion plus tax lands pretty much on the dot), and the distributors and retailers stuck to that price, no absurd price-gouging at all. Availability seemed fine in that when I went to bed a couple hours after the launch I could still order one if I wanted to. Hopefully that bodes well for the Big Navi launch, though I do expect much greater variance in mark-ups. Too early for me to commit though, I really don't want to move my aging 290X to yet another machine and with the absence of any reasonably-priced next-gen GPUs from either team this year, a new PC remains a tough sell.

Started tinkering about around the same age, but only by tearing down and rebuilding old systems whenever we got a new family PC. First build I did myself would've been an Athlon XP I guess. It's probably more luck than anything that I've never made any meaningful screwups working with hardware since then.

I screwed up yesterday - or rather, this morning at 2am - when I decided to clean my PC interior for the first time since I built it five years ago. Somehow lost one of the CPU cooler fan mounting clips while remounting the heatsink. The fan stays on acceptably with one clip, but I'm worried the other one might be floating inside the case somewhere and cause a short. Spent two hours looking for it inside and outside the case but it's like it was sucked into a dimensional vortex. You'd think a 12cm piece of springy wire would be more conspicuous but nope. No immediate disaster as the thing still boots up. I probably shouldn't have done so in that state, but in the process of standing the case up back to vertical I accidentally hit the power button - if you couldn't tell by now I have pretty poor build discipline and left it live while working in it. But it does feel like I'm playing with fire, and if it ends in tears I guess I might have to get back on the Zen 3 train. (I wasn't doing this for no reason, I've been having some issues with my keyboard momentarily disconnecting under load and there's a non-zero possibility that it's heat/power/connection related)

I'll be getting one (Sex) just for Overcooked All You Can Eat edition to be honest. That is, whenever general availability of the consoles in-store is.

Given that FarmVille is shutting down at the end of the year, Intel better hustle.

I shelved my Outer Worlds run with the expectation of buying a new video card soon, i.e. within a few months. Well, it's over a year since then and I haven't upgraded a thing, and I will not be doing so until next year. May as well wait for the Gold HD edition now before going back I suppose. ______________ On topic, my last purchase was a microtransaction for Picross Touch on Android. 3600 more puzzles for about $4 isn't too bad I suppose, at a little over 0.1 cents apiece. The main problem though is that the puzzles are evenly divided into board sizes of 5x5, 10x10, 15x15, and 20x20 size boards. The first category is too trivial to be fun, and the last one is virtually unplayable on a phone - at least my phone which is unusually narrow. Being a 21:9 6" display, everything on it actually displays smaller than it did on my previous 5.2" phone which had a conventional 16:9 display. As a consequence, I'm only actually able to play half of the puzzles, but still, $4.

After seeing the prices of all the next-gen stuff that's likely going to be out this year, and accounting for the Australia tax on top of them, I'm shelving my plans for a new PC this year. I was already pretty dubious after seeing the 5600X price, despite it having the same effective official price as the US, but that was contingent on everything else coming together just right. RTX 3070 example: $499 USD plus 10% tax comes out to $780 AUD. The official local price is $809. It's just launched now and the cheapest available model is $899 for one specific model from one retailer with bugger-all availability. The majority are well over four-digits in price. And given that's the cheapest of the announced next-gen cards, this is the point where I officially fold. I'll target a 5600 non-X and either a 3060-series or 6700-series card next year I think. In the meantime, I'm instead going to pivot towards getting myself a couple of new monitors. My ancient U2711 is officially dying - it's been acting up and requiring a power cycle pretty often for a couple years, but now the colour deterioration is becoming increasingly obvious - notably in the blue sub-pixels. I just recalibrated it yesterday and with the colour balance settings, and with blue pegged to 100, both red and green have to be dropped down into the 60-70 range just to get the standard 6500K colour balance. And partly as a consequence of that, at 100% brightness the screen is not bright enough to hit the calibration target. While I'm replacing that monitor, and with Black Friday looming, I figure I may as well double-down and replace my primary monitor, an Asus MG279Q which I never truly liked. Its limited FreeSync functionality was never worth the loss in image and build quality over the two Dell Ultrasharp models that flanked it (a U2715? and the aforementioned U2711), and all of its controls are idiotically placed on the backside of the monitor so I have to give it a reacharound to even turn it on. So yeah, in for a penny, in for a pound: I'm pretty certain I'll be picking up one each of a Dell S2721DGF (a gaming monitor with the usual trimmings) and a S2721DS (their basic IPS screen, only difference to the $20 cheaper S2721D is that the stand is adjustable). Neither are "premium" models like the Ultrasharps, but I think with calibration the difference should be largely negligible. Only complaint is that the DGF looks tacky as hell from the back, with utterly pointless strips of blue LEDs that fortunately can be turned off. Based on recent Prime Day pricing I can pick up both for about $800 combined, still less than the RTX 3070. Yeah...

I want All-in-Wonder mode.

Double post

Interesting and all that, but my playground will probably be in the 6700/XT vs 3060/Ti battle. Said before that I'm okay with stretching to ~50% more than I've ever paid for a video card before, and while that's negotiable to an extent, every single option from both vendors is over +100% of that price. Doesn't help that the local RRP for the 3070 was inflated in relative terms: in the US, a 3070, Xbox SeX, and PS5 are all the same price, yet the 3070 lands at $60 more than the consoles here.

Likely no one is surprised as I am that I'm playing Pillars of Eternity. I don't like RTwP, I don't like party management, I don't like inventory management, and I've only really ever tried to play the game briefly when it first launched. And yet despite all that, here I am playing it. The situation came about mostly because of my irritation at BG3 - not the unpolished state it's in but rather some of the fundamental DnD-oriented design decisions. Reading up on some feedback about the game I happened to be reminded that PoE2 now has a turn-based mode, something that has completely slipped my mind. I didn't know whether such a thing would also be in PoE1 so I fired it up and had a poke around. My save was dated 2017 but I suspect it was just an aborted attempt at resuming the game that might have lasted half-an-hour at best. Anyway, continuing my old save finds me still in Gilded Vale - yes that's as far as I've ever gotten - having apparently just begun the small dungeon in town. I am a rogue, as is my custom, and I remember not particularly enjoying it because the game isn't built for sneak killing enemies one by one like say, a Thief, Deus Ex or Dishonored. Hell, I remember Valygar being a hell of a lot more effective in BG2, though that might be his high level plus 20 years of dead brain cells talking. At any rate, the resulting feeling that it was barely worth using stealth is probably a big reason I ended up dropping out pretty fast the first time around. I don't want to restart though, I'm comfortable with the character in a roleplaying sense - and have just been living with the fact that all I'm doing with stealth for now is to open fights with a sneak crossbow shot. I had hoped that I could be completely hands-off with controlling the companions in combat, but regrettably this has not been the case and they tend to just twiddle their thumbs until I at least order them to get closer. Without micro-managing further than that, the combat is proving to be plenty challenging especially since the early companions seem to be of the squishy variety, one aside. Only after a full day of playing and getting to the point of claiming the player stronghold did I realise that the difficulty was set to Normal, instead of the Easy that I assumed it was on. I guess 2015 me was a bit less of a wuss than 2020 me. I don't think I'd get near to finishing the game in Normal so I think I'll be toggling it down next session. Aaaanyway, the game is playing okay for now. I won't say I'm having a great time but it's passable. I might decide to drop it at any moment to try out the turn-based mode in the sequel but I figure I'll give it at least the weekend to see if I can get into a groove.

The third-party stores also now offer the Steam key version, and it looks like the cheapest among them are Gamebillet and Indiegala at 60% off each, so save a little bit more on top. Both are official stores, no problems there. If you want the GOG version you'll have to settle for 50% off though.

But what you're truly missing is the ability to throw water bottles across the dressing room.

Clearly it was the BLAND corporation this time.

Ultima 8: The Lost Vale

So there's been an unfortunate snafu with the first major patch being issued, withdrawn, and then reissued, causing a fair few installation problems for some people - myself included. In the end Galaxy's handling of it was rather suboptimal to say the least: it ended up downloading more data to finally fix the installation than it would have just reinstalling the game from scratch. Something in the order of 100GB. Normally that wouldn't be an issue for me, but this month it ended up blowing up my download limit and I've been reliant on phone tethering all weekend as a result. Ugh. On the plus side, it was the final push I needed to switch my ISP this month. I was going to do so next month anyway as my current one is going to push through an extortionate $25/mo price hike for the same service after my next billing cycle, so I've just shifted the move up one month.

The G700 is probably the worst mouse I've ever bought. It was on a fairly steep discount to be fair, and I was still playing MMOs at the time so the extra buttons had some appeal. Unfortunately the battery life was measured in days at best, compared to months (or even a year) for my previous MX1100 or at least weeks for my current MX Master. Probably something to do with an increase in polling rate because of the "gaming" factor, but I've never cared about that. Nowadays the extra buttons just get in the way, and the shape, while similar to most other Logitech premium mice, is marginally less comfortable than I'd like. I think the bottom end is maybe just a bit too bulbous, same as how I feel about PS4 controllers come to think of it. I quite like trackballs too, I use them with laptops whether it be at work or at home. I think the association comes from my first experience with a trackball being on my dad's 66MHz Compaq laptop back in the day. These days I've found the ability of the current Logitech MX Ergo trackball to be invaluable in my bedroom HT setup, as I need to control both the NUC and the laptop pretty much at the same time, and being able to switch between them at the touch of a button is godly. Before that, I had two separate but identical trackballs for them (the venerable M570) which was more than a little confusing.

I like be quiet!'s (geez that's a typing nightmare) coolers and PSUs, but find their cases a bit tacky. Not Thermaltake/Coolermaster/etc level tacky, but weirdly overdesigned. Went with a Noctua cooler this time entirely for price reasons, which is a criterion they normally lose to Scythe - a special meant I could get their 14cm version for what 12cm coolers normally sell for. They do sell black versions of their product these days, though you pay extra for the privilege. For me though, even if I had a case with a window, my home office layout means the window would sit uselessly against the inside of my desk, and I'd lose out on the sound dampening material on the regular side panel. Anyway, hopefully the next step isn't too hard, but I haven't started looking. Good RAM that doesn't have a uselessly tall heatsink.

My journey towards a new PC started yesterday with a couple of piecemeal purchases. A 2TB Crucial MX500 SATA SSD (from Amazon UK) and a Noctua U14S (from Newegg Taiwan) will be arriving in the following weeks. No rush on the build as such though - as I've said before, the schedule will probably be dictated by AMD's release calendar beyond this first wave of Zen 3 CPUs so it may well run into the new year. In the meantime I'll just ready the parts that aren't likely to age while I wait. I'll plug the SSD into my current system immediately of course, replacing one of the 250GB ones currently in there since I'm out of SATA ports and it's not worth buying a SATA expansion port for short-term usage. That means my SSD storage will consist of a 500GB SATA M.2 system drive, plus 1x2TB, 1x1TB and 2x250GB 2.5" disks. That's probably enough for a few years yet so I'll likely migrate all four of those SATA disks to the new system to live alongside a new NVME system drive. (I should probably go look up how many SATA ports current B550 boards typically have) Next purchases will probably be a case and PSU, but I'm a bit worried since I'm back working at the office now and without a car would have some difficulty lugging a case from the local post centre if I miss the initial delivery. Nonetheless the likely candidates are probably a Fractal Design Define 7 in white (because my current Define case is black) and a be quiet! Straight Power 11, if the current special I see on it is still current by the time I'm ready to order. Otherwise maybe the ol' reliable Corsair RM750X. Rest of the system is far more volatile of course but in terms of price guidance I'll probably look to the hypothetical 5600 or 5700X CPU depending on value, and whatever Navi model ends up competing pricewise between the 3060 and 3070. P.S. I believe the only two motherboards I've used which have ever died were both MSI. But to be fair to them, one was on my Pentium 3 600, and the other on an Athlon XP I built for my parents.

Finally made some time to get started after buying it on GOG via VPN for the equivalent of about $50AUD (~$37USD). Bit naughty I know but I've never paid the full $90AUD RRP for the regular edition of a game and I'm not about to start now. Besides, it'd be silly if I paid full price now and then also bought the CE on actual launch, which I'd be inclined to do if the game turns out good. Strong "if" though. I probably don't have anything particularly new to say that hasn't already been said in this thread. Performance on my 290X is spotty (and using Vulkan absolutely tanks the framerate), especially outdoors. Playing co-op only and there's a really annoying bug where the game constantly thinks the other player is engaged in dialogue, which is resolved by actually starting and ending another dialogue. All this is perfectly forgivable for an Early Access game of course, but are the biggest obstacles to enjoying the game as-is. I came into the game not knowing anything about 5E (or indeed 4E) but it doesn't seem all that complicated, but then as a rogue there's probably not much complexity to be had. Took a moment to figure out the spell memorisation later when I got control of the spellcasting NPCs. I'm also failing checks harder than XCOM, and I think in the final game I might look for a mod to just make all the checks static ones as per the Obsidian philosophy. Another thing carried from D:OS, particularly the first one, is that it's not particularly clear at all in which sequence you should tackle the content. It's very easy to just get funneled into the dungeon full of level 2 enemies while there's still a lot of level 1 content outside. Indeed it's fully possible to stumble into it without a full party if playing single-player, because while all the companions in this version are technically accessible almost immediately, you need a bit of luck or foreknowledge to get the right ones for your party balance before blundering into a challenging encounter. If you know where they are, only one is non-trivial (by being behind a big fight). In the end, my biggest concern for the game remains unchanged from what it was before I played this version. That the DnD licence would be a straitjacket on gameplay. The D:OS games may be somewhat divisive for pure roleplayers, but as co-op games they were unmatched, and I think the restrictions of DnD mechanics makes the emergent gameplay lose some of that magic. P.S. Get rid of the stupid lootable vases already, ugh.

Would have liked to see more than one model in the mainstream price range, but oh well. I'm not targeting any sort of performance benchmark, happy with grabbing the best value "decent" CPU in my price range which will probably be $300-500AUD. The 5600X will land at the top of that range so other, older options can't be ruled out. I don't know if that's rational, but my desire to build a new PC isn't rational in the first place, coming from a 6700K. I just can't be bothered dealing it anymore and want a fresh start. But that thing cost me about $500AUD and I have no intention on spending more than that on a CPU no matter how good it is (disregarding future decades worth of inflation of course).